The ‘Less is More’ Principle in Content Marketing

These days, it is so easy for people to suffer from information overload due to the sheer amount of content they have access to. Because of this, it is harder than ever to get people’s attention.

People eat SPAM. So don’t be spammy. 😀

This is a huge challenge for Filipino marketers (Asides from the traffic in EDSA), because they want to get their message heard among the public. So what is the best way to deliver a marketing message that people will listen to? The answer is simple: create a simple, clear message that will be easy for your customers to digest, rather than trying to spam them with all the benefits they can get from your product. In other words: less is more.

A clear demonstration

One illustration of how powerful the ‘less is more’ principle is comes from a famous demonstration conducted by Columbia University professor Sheena Iyengar. She set up a testing booth to sell jam at a supermarket on two consecutive weekends. During the first weekend, she offered 24 varieties of jam and on the second, just six. The result was that, although the more extensive display drew more people to taste, the one with the smaller number of choices sold more jams. Hence, the more direct and clear your message is, the more likely your customer is to respond.

The 10 rules of the “Less is More” Content Marketing Strategy

How can you apply this “Less is More” principle to your Internet marketing campaigns? Let’s check out some of the basic strategies…

When you’re adding new content to your site, add less of it, but make sure that what you do add is meaningful and useful to your customers. While it may seem that you’re not

Three words….O – OhM – MyG – Gulay

giving your customers enough when you give them new content only once daily, you’re actually creating more demand among them for your content than if you posted five times a day without quality. Exceptional content will also generate more traffic in the long run and help build your brand as an expert in your niche. In addition, there are many advantages to not having too much average content on your site, such as fewer risks of developing problems in facts/data.

Before posting new content to your site, you should ask yourself if it genuinely provides useful information to your target audience as well as supporting your business objectives. If it does not fulfill those two objectives, then you should not post it. Or you should rewrite it to make it more meaningful to your audience.

When you’re conducting an e-mail marketing campaign, send fewer e-mails but add more substance to them. For example, fill them with tips or how-tos that will provide value to the recipient. This will give them more reason to click on the link back to your site. Or if you’re using the e-mails to promote a certain product and you’re offering a free gift you should focus on offering just a single promotion rather than combining a number of promotions in a single e-mail. Remember, Filipinos are always hungry for offers – But blasts them with tons of marketing arsenal and you’ll get labeled as a “Spammer”.

When you’re using your Facebook page to connect with your customers, avoid posting repetitive content on your Timeline. When you post to your Timeline, you have to make sure that it is something that will be meaningful to your customers so that they’ll be motivated to keep coming back to your page to see what else you’ve posted. If you have nothing intelligent to say, don’t bother posting since you’ll just be diluting your brand. Another thing to consider is you have to post content that is actually interesting, engaging and intuitive to your audience rather than something that simply reflects your own brand.

When you put social media buttons on your content for sharing, put only a few buttons for the most frequently used social media sites on it, but make sure they display the number of people who have used the buttons to retweet or share the content on Facebook. This will encourage new visitors who are encountering the content for the first time to share it if they found it useful. Fewer choices also mean it is easier for customers to share the content.

Avoid using too many hashtags on your tweets. The purpose of the hashtags is to make it easier for people to find the tweets they want to read without having to scan through all of them. By putting in too many hashtags you are defeating the purpose of putting in the tags in the first place.

Make sure that you are sharing something useful with your tweets. Again, you should avoid tweeting for the sake of sending a tweet. Every time you send out a tweet, it should contain a link to useful content, or be something that your customers actually find meaningful.

Use less written content and more visual content such as videos and infographics. These forms of content are slowly becoming the most shared content on the web as well as being

A simple, clean website with clear call-to-action links.

among the most clicked on. Even blog posts that contain some form of visual content were more popular than those that were purely text-based. Hence, you should create more such content that you can share throughout your various social media platforms.

Use less promotional content on your Facebook page and more posts that engage your visitors in a conversation, such as asking users for feedback or requesting answers for a particular question such as ‘how can we improve Product X?’. Avoid over-repetition.

Get your videos short but catchy! Filipinos love it! Study shows that those videos who are 30-seconds and below gets the most brand impact.

There is always an exception to any rule. A lot of content is not that bad – Just make sure it is properly organized and will not overwhelm your target customers. Always remember that you’re creating content to attract, not scare them.

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Paul Agabin Paul Agabin is the Founder and CEO of Wooka Interactive. He is an internet marketer based in the Philippines which deals with varied topics such as local industry news, seo strategies, content marketing, inbound marketing, social media management, website reviews, and the like. You can contact him at 0917-5069839.